Blog about things I find interesting, or incredibly stupid.
Mostly its to make fun of other people, post links I find funny and lower the amount of crap I post elsewhere - email me, feel free to comment and please click an ad from time to time!

Monday, February 7, 2011

Is your foreign gov't shutting off your internet? The U.S. Military has the ability to turn it back on, at least temporarily

I AM NOT SAYING MUBARAK'S ADMINISTRATION IS AN OPPRESSIVE REGIME (I'm actually consciously not taking a public position on it). This post is solely for the tech portion of the content, nothing political.

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If your lack of internet isn't stemming from not paying your bill, or not restarting your humongous Linksys router, but instead your gov't shutting it off... it turns out the same Cyber tools that the U.S. Military can (in theory...) use to disrupt internet-based communications, cellular networks, satellite links etc can be used in reverse to turn it back on, albeit temporarily. This blurb from the article puts it best:

[John] Arquilla [a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School] doesn’t want to go into detail how the classified plane could get a denied internet up and running again, but if it flies over a bandwidth-denied area, suddenly your Wi-Fi bars will go back up to full strength.“We have both satellite- and nonsatellite-based assets that can come in and provide access points to get people back online,” Arquilla says. “Some of it is done from ships. You could have a cyber version of pirate radio.”